The volatility of volatility: Measuring change in party vote shares (original) (raw)
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Patterns of intra-election volatility: the impact of political knowledge
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One key trend changing political environments across advanced industrial democracies is increasing electoral volatility. Despite extensive research, at the individual level we still know relatively little about the mechanisms behind electoral volatility during election campaigns, including the impact of political knowledge. Against this background and based on a four-wave panel study in the context of the 2014 Swedish national election, the purpose of this paper is to investigate (a) patterns of intra-election volatility and the impact of (b) political knowledge on patterns of electoral volatility. Distinguishing between party alienation, crystallization, wavering, reinforcement, and conversion, among other things, findings show some effects from political knowledge on patterns of electoral volatility but only for acquired political knowledge. KEYWORDS Electoral volatility; campaign effects; political knowledge; election campaigns One of the key trends changing political environments across advanced industrial democracies is increasing electoral volatility (Dalton, McAllister, and Wattenberg 2000; Drummond 2006; Mair 2008). The same holds true for Sweden, the case of this study. More and more voters are deciding which party to vote for during the election campaigns, and the share of voters switching parties between or during election campaigns has increased significantly. Between 1960 and 2014, the share of voters switching party between election campaigns (inter-election volatility) increased from 11 to 36%, while the share of voters switching parties during election campaigns (intra-election volatility) increased from 7 to 17% between 1968 and 2014 (Oscarsson 2016).
Volatility and Electoral Shocks
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The General Elections of 2015 and 2017 marked a historically high level of volatility, both at the aggregate level and at the level of the individual voter. In this chapter we describe how this increased volatility is part of a long-term trend in British politics, but one which accelerated markedly after 2010. At the aggregate level, 2015 and 2017 were the two most volatile elections since 1931. At the individual-level, they were the two most volatile elections we have data to measure. Unlike aggregate volatility, which has changed erratically over time, we show that individual-level volatility has been steadily and significantly increasing since 1964. Moreover, unlike many elections when vote flows favouring one party are compensated by counter-flows favouring another, voters in 2015 and 2017 moved systematically, first away from, and then towards the two major parties.
Party novelty and congruence: A new approach to measuring party change and volatility
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We propose a new three-dimensional approach to party newness and an interval index of party congruence/novelty. Building on this, we also propose a split-vote-by-congruence (SBC) approach to electoral volatility that employs the index. Four elections from different countries that exhibited different forms of party change are used to illustrate the approach. The congruence/novelty index corresponds to our qualitative case knowledge, and the SBC approach leads to meaningful volatility scores. Ad hoc coding of parties as new/old or singular successors/predecessors can seriously over- or underestimate volatility that explains divergence among volatility scores in literature. By eliminating the need for dichotomous and often controversial coding decisions, the SBC approach allows for a substantially more reliable calculation of volatility.
New Approaches to Electoral Volatility: Evidence from Postcommunist Countries
2009
and the Comparative Parties Reading Group at NYU for helpful suggestions and comments. We are particularly grateful to Mik Laver, whose comments on a different paper inspired this one. We thank as well Grigore Pop-Eleches for comments and suggestions as well as generous access to his many valuable data-sets. Citations are most welcome, but please check Tucker's website for the most up to date version of the paper:http://homepages.nyu.edu/˜jat7/pubs.html. All statistical analyses conducted using R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08) and WinBUGS.
British Journal of Political Science, 2016
We wish to begin by thanking Crabtree and Golder 1 for the time and effort they have spent replicating the results in Powell and Tucker 2 and providing further evidence in support of the primary substantive conclusion of that article. We also want to thank the British Journal of Political Science for offering us the opportunity to revisit the topic of electoral volatility in post-communist countries. The primary goal of P&T (2014) was to rigorously conceptualize a new approach to thinking about electoral volatilityby disaggregating electoral volatility into volatility between parties that were present across both elections in a pair of consecutive elections ('Type B' volatility) and volatility due to new party entry and party exit ('Type A' volatility), an approach that is especially important in the context of postcommunist countriesand to provide a comprehensive dataset for two decades of post-communist elections that incorporates these new measures. To be clear, P&T (2014) was not the only piece arguing for the importance of disaggregating measures of electoral volatility, 3 but the article makes a contribution by systematically laying out a set of rules for exactly how to code these two different types of volatility (itself a complex task), making a case for why volatility should be coded in this particular manner and providing a substantially expanded set of measures relative to previous work. Concurrently, in the course of introducing these new measures and data, P&T (2014) replicates and extends the existing literature on volatility in post-communist countries by adding additional countries and years of data beyond what had been included in previous analyses. To do so, P&T (2014) relies on a very specific algorithm to determine a priori which elections to include in the analysis. 4 These analyses produced an interesting empirical finding: once these additional countries and years were added to the analysis, almost all of the previous results disappeared, 5 leaving practically no
In the literature on electoral volatility and party defection, structural elements have been put forward as crucial variables. Especially the party system is suggested to be of importance for understanding differences in levels of volatility between countries. First of all, the electoral system has been shown to have an impact on levels of volatility. In majoritarian and highly disproportional systems, electoral volatility proved to be more pronounced. With regard to the party system two dimensions can be distinguished. First, the number of parties within an electoral system is expected to be related to levels of electoral volatility. It is argued that the more options voters have, the more they will be inclined to switch. Second, the extent to which a party system is polarized matters as well. The more polarized a party system is, the larger ideological distances between parties are. Therefore, switching parties implies a more pronounced ideological shift for a voter and should therefore become less probable. Although these variables have been empirically studied separately, there has not yet been a large comparative investigation including them in one analysis with cross-national data on the individual level. Using the second and third module of the CSES project this paper investigated volatility for 25531 respondents in 32 elections between 2000 and 2010. Using multilevel models that include country level variables while controlling for important individual level characteristics we have an optimal control of the simultaneous effect of these separate variables. Our results show that the effect of individual-level variables such as education and a persons’ satisfaction with democracy remain strong predictors of electoral volatility even in a cross-national analysis. Of the variables on the contextual level proportionality and the number of parties seem to have an effect on switching parties between elections. Volatility is higher in more proportional systems. Furthermore, it seems that the sheer number of parties increases the propensity to change a voters choice regardless of their polarization. This last finding is a refutation of a longstanding claim in the literature that it is the distance between the parties rather than the number that influences volatility. Because we tested three different measures for polarization separately that can be found in the literature, this can be considered a robust finding. We furthermore find a cross-level interaction effect that shows that satisfaction with the way democracy works in a country leads to different odds of switching votes depending on the effective number of parties in that election.
Extra- and Within-system Electoral Volatility
2016
We analyze the remarkable differences in the electoral success of new parties and compare the determinants of electoral volatility attributable to new versus established parties. We base our findings on an original data set of total volatility, extra-system volatility, and within-system volatility for 67 democratic countries across all regions of the world since 1945. The article makes three contributions. First, we show that it is important to distinguish between electoral volatility that represents vote shifts among established parties (within-system volatility) and shifts to new parties (extra-system volatility). Second, we provide descriptive information about total, within-system, and extra-system volatility for 67 countries. Third, we analyze the determinants of volatility. Our results show that the causes of within- and extrasystem volatility differ markedly. In contrast to Powell and Tucker, for our broader range of countries and longer time period, there are several statistically robust positive findings.
Dataset of Electoral Volatility and its internal components in Western Europe (1945-2015)
This dataset provides data on electoral volatility and its internal components in parliamentary elections (lower house) in 19 countries of Western Europe for the period 1945-2015. It covers the entire universe of Western European elections held after World War II under democratic regimes. Data for Greece, Portugal and Spain have been collected after their democratizations in the 1970s. Altogether, a total of 339 elections (or, more precisely, electoral periods) are included. This dataset will be regularly updated so as to include latest elections. How to cite this dataset? Emanuele, V. (2015), Dataset of Electoral Volatility and its internal components in Western Europe (1945-2015), Rome: Italian Center for Electoral Studies, http://dx.doi.org/10.7802/1112 Publications based on this dataset Chiaramonte, A. and Emanuele, V. (2015), Party System Volatility, Regeneration and De-Institutionalization in Western Europe (1945-2015), Party Politics, doi:10.1177/1354068815601330
British Journal of Political Science, 2014
This article provides a detailed set of coding rules for disaggregating electoral volatility into two components: volatility caused by new party entry and old party exit, and volatility caused by vote switching across existing parties. After providing an overview of both types of volatility in post-communist countries, the causes of volatility are analysed using a larger dataset than those used in previous studies. The results are startling: most findings based on elections in post-communist countries included in previous studies disappear. Instead, entry and exit volatility is found to be largely a function of long-term economic recovery, and it becomes clear that very little is known about what causes ‘party switching’ volatility. As a robustness test of this latter result, the authors demonstrate that systematic explanations for party-switching volatility in Western Europe can indeed be found.